Dystopian or useful? Amazon’s ring doorbells will now be able to recognize visitors through a new facial recognition feature, the company said Tuesday. The controversial feature, called “familiar face,” is announced at the beginning of this September And now it’s rolling out to owners of the device in the United States.
Amazon says the feature lets you recognize the people who regularly come to your door by cataloging up to 50 faces. This can include family members, friends and neighbors, delivery drivers, household staff, and more. After tagging a person in the ring app, the device will know when to approach the ring’s camera.
Then, instead of alerting you that “someone is at your door,” you’ll receive personalized notifications, like “Mom at the door,” the company says announcementSee rank-.
The feature has received pushback from consumer protection organizations, like effand US Senator.
Ring owners on Amazon can use a feature to help them turn off alerts they don’t want to see – like the news, the comments are their own, the company says. And he was able to set the mark just right.
The feature is not enabled by default. However, the user must enable the application settings.
Meanwhile, faces can be named in the app directly from the event history section or from the brand new face library. Once tagged, the face will be named in all notifications, in the app timeline, and in event history. The label can be edited at any time, and there is a tool to merge duplicates or remove faces.
TechCrunch events
San Francisco
I’m fat
October 13-15, 2026
Amazon insists face data is encrypted and never shared with others. In addition, said Anonymous face is automatically removed after 30 days.
Privacy policy through facial recognition
Despite Amazon’s privacy assurance, the addition of related features.
The company has a history Partner with law enforcement and even provided the police and fire departments with capabilities Request data from the ringing neighbor application By asking Amazon directly for someone’s doorbell recording. Most recently, Amazon partnered with sheepmaker of AI-Powered surveillance cameras used by Police, federal law enforcement, and iceSee rank-.
Do-it-yourself security efforts have stalled in the past.
The ring must pay a fine of $5.8 million and $523 After the Federal Trade Commission found that employees and contractors had no access to customer videos for years. Its Neighbors app is also exposed The user’s home address and exact location, and the user’ Password has been floating around the web for years.
Given Amazon’s willingness to work with law enforcement and digital identity providers, combined with its poor security track record, we would suggest that the owner of the ring, at least not know the correct name; Better yet, keep the feature turned off and just search for anyone. Not everything needs an AI upgrade.
As a result of the privacy policy, Amazon’s ring has faced calls from Senator Ed FE (D-Mass.) TO Deny this featureand faced backlash from consumer protection organizations, like eff. Privacy laws prevent amazon from rolling out the feature on Illinois, Texasand Portland, Oregon, eff has also notedSee rank-.
Respond Questions provided by the organizationAmazon says your biometric data will be processed in the cloud, and claims it doesn’t use the data to train its AI models. It is also not possible to find out all the locations where people have been detected, from a technical point of view, even if law enforcement requests this data.
However, it is not clear why this will not happen, given Go to “Party Search” Feature That looks at the camera of the neighborhood ring to find the missing dog and cat.